An AAU basketball game in Georgia devolved into chaotic violence Sunday when Chicago-based R.A.W. Athletics got into a brawl with the game officials while their opponent, the Houston Raptors, watched on from the sidelines.
A pair of videos that have been circulating on Twitter since the incident shows R.A.W. Athletics players surrounding a referee who had just fallen to the ground and getting a few shots in, before letting him back up, followed up by the official himself, along with his colleagues, exchanging words with the team and charging in, beginning a huge melee.
It’s an ugly scene for sure, and absolutely inappropriate, but it’s also important to remember that the main culprits involved were just a group of teenagers who, from their point of view, were merely trying to protect themselves.
Meanwhile, the adults in the room, who weren’t being attacked, appeared to be either just filming the carnage or were content to stay on the sidelines watching the whole confrontation play out.
Even worse, as ESPN’s Myron Medcalf reported, it appears the coaches of both teams, Howard Martin and Bobby Benjamin, just opted to play a game of “he said, she said” instead of taking any sort of responsibility.
[blockquote]“At the end of the game, one of my players was complaining about a call,” Martin told ESPN. “He made a comment to the referee. The ref didn’t like it. So the other team inbounded the ball, walked it up, the ref said to my player, ‘Say it again.’ Then he T’d him up and kicked him out of the game. And he walked behind him, still having words. Then the ref pushed my player, and they squared up right by my bench. When they squared up, another one of my players jumped off the bench and took [the ref] down. We separated them.”
…
“I’m telling him, ‘Hey, hey, it’s all good.’ [And he says], ‘Who hit the ref?’” Martin said. “He’s running to the ref’s defence. He’s coming over to join in whatever’s going on. … He finally calms down some. Then the kid who was involved in taking the ref down comes over and says, ‘It’s me, trying to take responsibility for it.’ [The ref] charged the kid. And it all went to hell.”
[cite]- ESPN[/cite][/blockquote]
[blockquote]”The referee definitely didn’t attack the kids,” Benjamin said. “Absolutely not. Once things got going, and he was attacked … he got assaulted. They were too outnumbered to even try to defend themselves.”
[cite]- ESPN[/cite][/blockquote]
In the aftermath of the fight, Medcalf also reports that multiple officers arrived on the scene to break things up and that the local police department had launched an investigation into the entire incident.
Regardless how everything eventually ends up, whether with legal action or actual charges being laid, this was a scenario that could’ve been entirely prevented or at least stopped a lot earlier than it did, had the actual adults in the room did what they were supposed to do.
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